Blueberry (comics)

Blueberry is a Western comic series created in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition by the Belgian scriptwriter Jean-Michel Charlier and French comics artist Jean "Mœbius" Giraud. It chronicles the adventures of Mike Steve Donovan alias Blueberry on his travels through the American Old West. Blueberry is an atypical western hero; he is not a wandering lawman who brings evil-doers to justice, nor a handsome cowboy who "rides into town, saves the ranch, becomes the new sheriff and marries the schoolmarm". In any situation, he sees what he thinks needs doing, and he does it.

The series spawned out of the 1963 Fort Navajo comics series, originally intended as an ensemble narrative, but which quickly gravitated around the breakout character "Blueberry" as the main and central character after the first two stories, causing the series to continue under his name later on. The older stories, released under the Fort Navajo moniker, were ultimately reissued under the name Blueberry as well in later reprint runs. Two spin-off, or rather, sub-series, La Jeunesse de Blueberry (Young Blueberry) and Marshal Blueberry, were created pursuant the main series reaching its peak in popularity in the early 1980s.

It has been remarked that during the 1960s, Blueberry "was as much a staple in French comics as, say, The Avengers or The Flash here [in the USA]".

Born on 30 October 1843 on Redwood Plantation near Augusta, Georgia, Michael Steven Donovan is the son of a rich Southern planter and starts out life as a decided racist. On the brink of the American Civil War, Donovan is forced to flee north after being framed for the murder of his fiancée Harriet Tucker's father, a plantation owner. On his flight toward the Kentucky border, he is saved by Long Sam, a fugitive African-American slave from his father's estate, who paid with his life for his act of altruism. Inspired when he sees a blueberry bush, Donovan chooses the surname "Blueberry" as an alias when rescued from his Southern pursuers by a Union cavalry patrol (during his flight war had broken out between the States). After enlisting in the Union Army, he becomes an enemy of discrimination of all kinds, fighting against the Confederates (although being a Southerner himself, first enlisting as a bugler in order to avoid having to fire upon his former countrymen), later trying to protect the rights of Native Americans. He starts his adventures in the Far West as a lieutenant in the United States Cavalry shortly after the war. On his many travels in the West, Blueberry is frequently accompanied by his trusted companions, the hard-drinking deputy Jimmy McClure, and later also by "Red Neck" Wooley, a rugged pioneer and army scout.

In his youth, Giraud had been a passionate fan of American Westerns and Blueberry has its roots in his earlier Western-themed works such as the Frank et Jeremie shorts, which were drawn for Far West magazine when he was only 18 – also having been his first sales as free-lancer – and the by Joseph "Jijé" Gillain heavily inspired Western short stories he created for the magazines from French publisher Fleurus [fr] (his first professional tenured employment as comic artist in the period 1956–1958), in particular the series of short Western comics featuring the same protagonist Art Howell which can be considered as Giraud's de facto first realistic Western series (and thus a precursor to Blueberry), as he himself did in effect, since he, save the first one, endowed these stories with the subtitle "Un aventure d'Art Howell". This was followed by his collaboration with Jijé himself on an episode of the latter's Jerry Spring series in 1960, which appeared in the Belgian comics magazine Spirou ("La Route de Coronado [fr]", issues 1192 – 1213, 1961), aside from his subsequent Western contributions to Benoit Gillian's (son of Jijé) short-lived comic magazine Bonux-Boy (1960/61). Directly before he started his apprenticeship at Jijé, Jean Giraud had already approached Jean-Michel Charlier on his own accord, asking him if he was interested in writing scripts for a new western series for publication in Pilote, the just by Charlier co-launched legendary French comic magazine. Charlier refused on that occasion, claiming he never felt much empathy for the genre. Biographer Gilles Ratier [fr] though, has noted that Charlier, when he felt he was preaching to the choir, had the tendency to "take liberties" with actual events for dramatic effect. Charlier had in effect already written several Westerns, both comics and illustrated short prose stories, in the period 1949-1959 for various previous magazines. One such short entailed the text comic "Cochise" in Jeannot magazine, July 1957, dealing with the historical "Bascom Affair", which six years later would become the apotheosis of the first Blueberry story, "Fort Navajo". Furthermore, Charlier had already visited the South-West of the United States in 1960, resulting in several Native-American themed educational Pilote editorials.

In 1962, the magazine sent Charlier on a reporting assignment around the world for its editorials, and one of his last 1963 ports of call was Edwards Airforce Base in the Mojave Desert, California. He took the opportunity to (re-)discover the American West, returning to France with a strong urge to write a western. First he asked Jijé to draw the series, but Jijé, a lifelong friend and collaborator of Charlier, thought there would be a conflict of interest, since he was then a tenured artist at Spirou, a competing comic magazine, which published his own Western comic Jerry Spring, and in which he was very much invested. In his stead, Jijé proposed his protégé Giraud as the artist. A happy coincidence was that Giraud was also intimately familiar with the landscapes that had inspired Charlier, as he already had been on an extended stay of nine months in Mexico in 1956, where the endless blue skies and unending flat plains of Mexico's northern deserts had "cracked open his mind".

"Charlier, together with Goscinny the editors-in-chief, wanted a western. He already had outlines in mind, but asked me to come up with a name. He suggested a couple of names, which sounded not bad, but I wanted something softer for this rough and basic character. It was then that I saw that somebody had signed with the name "Blueberry" in Geographic Magazine, which was lying opened in front of me, purely by coincident. That was the right choice, and Charlier liked the name as well. For the hero's facial traits, I chose Belmondo, as he was at the time something of an art symbol for guys my age".

"From the very beginning, I did not want the classic type of fearless lawman like Red Ryder, The Lone Ranger or Jerry Spring as a hero. That kind of character had, in my opinion, already been done to death. That is why I made Blueberry the very opposite of these classic heroic archetypes. He is dirty, ugly, and bad-tempered. He drinks, smokes, gambles and swears. And also, to make him even more different from the other characters, who are more the wandering kind, I decided to make him a soldier. But again, I did not want him to be a good little soldier who follows orders and does what he is instructed to do. Blueberry is the exact opposite of that; he is undisciplined, cynical and hates authority."